Dilemma with good and bad linking tactics
Purchasing blog posts, from other website owners, has been looked at and evaluated by Google in recent SEO news, the Google Slap, and as a result many blogs devalued. The real estate industry was focused on quite heavily because competition in the real estate industry, between agents and offices, forced other to resort to paid tactics to generate higher link popularity, to gain strategic positioning on search engines, and as a result those sites were punished.
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Unfortunately that is not the dilemma driving this post. Let us explore the blogger who has a client and needs to finds affordable link building strategies resulting in the blogger posting on social/professional networking site and strategically linking to said client. Is that a breach of blogging ethics or is it just good business?
My clients and myself are not people that are made of money and divulge in purchasing fist full of links from quality directories, like Yahoo’s, and sometimes more creative strategies have to be explored just to be competitive with others who may have those deep pockets.
To me this sounds like smart business tactics for the benefit of my clients.
PR Update or so it seems
I was reviewing my real estate website yesterday and noticed that the healthy PR 5 it had was reduced to a 4. Now that does not make me to happy since all the work went into rebuilding the site using a SEO friendly platform. The good news is that most off the interior pages received 2, 3 or a 4 with the update.
It is questionable if the update will stick but for the most part I believe that it will. So after thinking “why did the homepage PR drop?” I could only come up with a small theory (also I have not visited other marketing blog to see what they are saying yet).
After the website change over none of the interior pages had any PR and since the new web platform is more SEO friendly the PR 5 was disbursed throughout the site. This disbursement reduced the PR of the homepage but improved the sites overall PR and SEO strength.
I did noticed some of my friends blogs, one being a PR 6, were reduced as too…well I am off to see what others are saying.
301 Direct Files
I have recently redone a real estate website and one of the procedures was to create a 301 Redirect file to make sure old pages would be redirected to the new landing page. But there seems to be a problem when Google reads the 301 Redirect file as well as giving weight to the landing pages.
The new site has aggregated many pages and focused them onto new pages that were more focused and centralized for their terms. The idea was to have the new landing pages be indexed right away since there were links pointing them, either on the 301 Redirect file and through other web pages. But it didn’t work as expected and pages with 301s attached to them still have yet to be redirected.
The other side of the equation is having brand new pages that had no 301 Redirect attached to them. The main example was the blog page that the site now has. The blog page has no links, no pages that use its feed or any other internet marketing strategy applied to it.
Now my question is it worth it or even in a website’s best interest to deploy a 301 Redirect when launching a new website?
If brand new pages get indexed faster than ones attached to a 301 Redirect then why even build a 301 Redirect?
Okay that is two questions but the idea has some intriguing thought. Anyone else have experience using 301 directs and their effects on search engine rankings?
Add your feed for free
I just added our feed to a new feed service called OgOg.org. It looks to be a very effecient service but only time will tell that is as good as it claims, view my profile.
Linking Strategies Explored
Over the past year there has been many changes across the internet regarding linking strategies and how effective they will over the long haul. To me there are three predominate with a few subset strategies being used and it is my goal to hash personal thoughts out as well as analyze some others to determine the most effective linking strategies for the future.
Acquiring mass links: Using the low cost strategy (in business terms) to gain the highest number of links in the shortest period of time using social media sites to set up free profiles. This strategy requires all the social media sites, Digg, MySpace, MSN Spaces, Newsvine and so on, that have no sign up fee where users can setup a profile and provide links to one source, like a website that needs to gain PR and attention. These free links, as they are, have no initial PR and require work just to get the page and the links on that page indexed within Google’ cache.
Benefit: A lot of links in a short period of time from a multitude of sources.
Drawback: There is no way to determine the value or quality of the link and takes a high investment of time.
Quality links in social media: Sites like Digg and Stumbleupon have high PR as well as trust rank with Google and can be used to sumit links to from blog postings as well as key pages in a website. If a marketer selects five sites to continually to submit stories to should increase the overall relevance and potential of the sites being used (that is the theory). The profiles, overtime, should gain the attention of Google and then themselves gain PR and trust.
Benefit: Quality links from a few sources while maximizing time and effort.
Drawback: The reach and disbursement of links is low in the short-term.
Acquiring the highest quality links: Using directories, bloggers and other social media sources to achieve the highest quality links and returns to gain PR and trust for a website. This strategy requires knowledge and connections that stem from basic social media but also go far beyond what one link is worth.
Benefit: The highest residual return from a link that will continue to age and bring in business long into the future.
Drawback: High time invest to seek out quality links as well as a high marketing budget to sustain the cost of the links.
As I am reviewing what was written the choice should seem easy, go with the highest quality to get the highest return. But what if a big budget is not an option for a company, should the just not seek any links? or should the try to hit all areas and build to something greater?
The latter is seems to be the best option and it is what I believe any small company should do to gain presence using continual drive an effort.